Where to even begin? Well . . . As you can see from the sticky post, War of Nytefall: Rivalry has been released. It went live on Friday and I’m hoping to see some movement over the course of the week. For those who haven’t noticed, check out the cover and click on it to go to Amazon:

Cover Art by Alison Hunt

There are going to be a bunch of guest posts going up around the Internet and I plan on sharing them all here. So, there’s going to be a high level of activity. At least when I can because I do have work and that life event. Really need to figure out when I can start calling that second thing by name. Anyway, let’s leave that alone because I sense that nobody who doesn’t know it really is has any idea. Some have even hinted that they think I’m being overly dramatic, but whatever. Moving on!

Jay Sherman (The Critic)

You might notice that the Goal Post is on Sunday instead of Saturday. Well, the secondary reason is because I wanted to announce War of Nytefall: Rivalry once it came out. The other reason is because I was in New York City hanging with a friend to just relax and have an early birthday celebration. We mostly wandered around and stopped at a bar for food and a drink from time to time. Had a lot of water too since it warmed up quickly and I couldn’t do anything about my jacket.

The big event of the day was seeing ‘SHAZAM!’ . . . I’m just going to say it. I’m already calling this my favorite superhero movie of 2019. It was funny, had great action, twists that I didn’t see coming, and the characters were simply likable. They also felt very human. Shazam is definitely a kid in the body of an adult. Freddie, his foster brother, has excellent comedic timing and the hyper, near obnoxiousness of him was countered by his utter honesty. These were believable characters to me, which is something I haven’t seen in a superhero movie in years. Also, the audience was laughing, cheering, and genuinely into the movie. There wasn’t a sense that they were doing it because they thought it was required. It was hilarious and had so much heart to the point where one revelation hits you so solidly in the gut. I expected something like it, but not to the level of bluntness that it was delivered. I highly recommend seeing because I don’t think we’re going to get many superhero movies that are this entertaining on a level beyond the spectacle.

Think I lost myself because this post became a movie review. The other thing I wanted to talk about is Twitter . . . Is anybody getting anything out of it? I was sitting here thinking up tweets to promote War of Nytefall: Rivalryand it wasn’t coming. The one that went live today didn’t even have the preview. I tried to switch the Amazon link with a new one, but still nothing. I had to retweet with an image attached. On days when I have 100+ retweets, I have no movement of the associated book. All I do is retweet on there too, so I’m not sure why I put so much energy and time into it. There’s really nothing coming out of there. I figure my options are the following:

Only have one pinned tweet per week to maintain some activity.

Use it for something else that creates interactions. Like pose a question every few days. This would require more work on my part, but you never know what will come from it.

Get rid of it completely.

I might try #1 for a bit to see what happens and try #2 from time to time. The issue really has become that I have such limited time that putting effort into something with no real payoff doesn’t appeal to me. I have 22.2K followers on there, but I seem to be running into the same people. I have to hunt through my own feed to find things to retweet because there’s so much junk. There is hesitation since I did work so hard to build that up, which is why #3 feels like a tantrum. Maybe I’ll see how this week goes and make a post next Sunday about Twitter to get some insight. I have scheduled tweets until Tuesday, so the last one will be left up there. Then I’ll pose an author-based question one other day to see the reaction. That sounds good.

In other news, my 39th birthday is Tuesday. Getting older isn’t sitting too well with me because of how life is going. I mean, the job is great and I’m making new friends. Writing is still difficult due to time, energy, and emotions. It’s really that life event. I figure this is a rebuilding year. It’s going to be busy and I’m going to be here and there. Realized that I can’t use my cellphone during the summer job, so you guys might not hear from me until the evening on weekdays. That’s far into the future. Geez, this paragraph was supposed to be about my birthday. Did get a few sweet presents like Deadpool sleeping pants and a weighted blanket. That’s really it for now. You really don’t get a lot of presents when you’re in your 30’s.

The plan for this week is to finally finish writing Chapter 8 of War of Nytefall: Eradication. I need to get this book done before the summer, which is when I’m going to work on my super secret project. It’s something that I can tinker with at a faster pace than my usual fare. That reminds me that I need to pick up some pocket moleskine notebooks to work on it. My last one got blown out of my hand by the wind and landed in a puddle. You can’t come back from submerging and there wasn’t anything written in it anyway. I was simply counting pages. Beyond all that, I’m going to slowly work on the May posts too. Running out of topics for June, which means I’ll have to sit down and figure those out as well.

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About Charles Yallowitz

Charles E. Yallowitz was born, raised, and educated in New York. Then he spent a few years in Florida, realized his fear of alligators, and moved back to the Empire State. When he isn't working hard on his epic fantasy stories, Charles can be found cooking or going on whatever adventure his son has planned for the day. 'Legends of Windemere' is his first series, but it certainly won't be his last.

45 Responses to New Book! Birthday! Twitter Stuff! Things! SHAZAM!

I’m with you on Twitter. I have 20,000+ followers and have tried everything to get traction on my books. Nothing seems to work. When you think about it, why would a Twitter follower run out and buy a book just because they saw it on Twitter? Best wishes on your launch.

Thanks. The weirdest thing is that you would think Twitter and other social media sites are good for such advertising. You see ads on there all the time, so it feels like a logical assumption. Yet, it doesn’t work that way, which is weird.

Great to know the movie was so good. It’s one of the ones on my list of movies I want to see, so it’s good to know people I know who are seeing it are loving it so much.

Nothing guarantees sales any more. All you can do is figure out what you enjoy doing that might possibly result in sales, and cross your fingers. That’s how it seems to me anyhow. The outcome of your average encounter in a roleplaying game is easier to predict than that of a marketing attempt these days. At least, it feels like it to me.

Thanks. It does feel like there’s no way to predict results. Makes me wonder what other people do that work. Then again, I’ve been told that live appearances, book signings, and conventions help. That’s hard to do when one is limited on time, money, and sell eBooks instead of physical copies.

Hard to say since the villain does some evil things. There’s a little cursing ‘s-word’ in there as well. A group of monsters are there as well with one scene that one would compare to a horror movie. Honestly, it’s that one scene and possibly another earlier one that would make me cautious about bringing a 5-year-old. The villain really doesn’t shy away from doing full on murder even though there isn’t any blood shown.

11 and 13 should be fine. My son is 9 and I plan on showing it to him at home when I have more control. That way the one scene (I don’t want to do spoilers) won’t have as much of an impact or we can pause if it’s too much. I’ve learned that you can never figure out what a kid will be scared of.

My son was scared of the Hulk until I pointed out that Hulk was throwing a tantrum just like he does. ‘Tangled’ was a movie that freaked him out and I was terrified by ‘E.T.’ when I was a kid. Yet, he had no problem watching ‘Jurassic Park’ and I loved ‘Ghostbusters’. Very strange.

Glad the film was good. I think you deserve a good time out. Twitter is like that for me too. I spend most of my time tweeting out the pinned posts of those who share my stuff. I’ve taken to making one pinned tweet per book and leaving it for months at a time. It seems to get as much action as a fresh one does. These days, I don’t even go there on writing days. Let’s face it, nothing seems to be working lately. Even paid promos don’t net what they once did.

The difficult thing with pinned posts staying up for so long is that it can only be shared once per person. I guess it doesn’t matter considering the daily ones aren’t helping at all either. Interesting how the older one gets the same action as fresh ones. It is frustrating that nothing seems to be working. Means I’m out of ideas.

I’m using a Twitter to try to promote an Etsy store and I can’t even get over a hundred followers after two years. Part of the problem is I’m not working hard enough on it, I know that, but I’ve only gotten two link clicks in the past year. We do a lot better with a Facebook page, oddly enough.

We sell more vintage stuff than crafty stuff, Etsy is a great place to sell vintage stuff now too. We do find instagram, yes, but it’s harder to work with, you have to put up the pictures separate from a link and you have to use a mobile device, no laptops.

Tumblr is an odd one, I actually enjoy using it, at least to look at stuff, I haven’t been as successful at getting people to look at what I post though. I have a feeling it’s the next one to shut down.

It just seems like Tumblr isn’t being used as much since shortly before Christmas when they implemented new rules against obscene contents, I heard that their program was mistaking normal things like knees for naked women.

Could never myself get used to Twitter, because I think that people don’t go there to shop? I myself have long ago started using it as an archive of links to things I read and liked.
The event…. I hope you make it nice for yourself, relax, breathe, have your favourite food or snack, and I am wishing you a good time in advance 🙂

I personally feel like you do about Twitter. Actually, I feel that way about all social media. But Mae Clair recently wrote a post at Story Empire about the way she uses Twitter (much different than the basic retweeting I do), and she’s having luck with it. You might want to check it out.

I didn’t think I was going to like the Shazam movie. It looked kind of dumb. Now I’m excited to see it. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks. The movie is fun. I think the ‘dumb’ comes from the hero being a kid in an adult body. So, you see some immaturity on his part, but it would be weird if he wasn’t like that. The trailers kept a lot of the drama as a surprise too.

I’ll look for that twitter post when I get a few moments. Think I’m burning out on non-blog social media too. Guess we’ll what happens.